Indiana University Bloomington names Outstanding Junior Faculty

March 25, 2015

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

BLOOMINGTON, Ind. -- Indiana University Bloomington faculty members in public affairs, music, psychology, informatics and physics have been named Outstanding Junior Faculty for the 2014-15 academic year.

The award is presented by the Office of the Vice Provost for Research and the Office of the Vice Provost for Faculty and Academic Affairs. It recognizes tenure-track faculty who have begun to develop nationally recognized research, scholarship or creative programs and devoted productive time to teaching and service prior to achieving tenure.

“These five Outstanding Junior Faculty Award recipients rose to the top among an extraordinary field of candidates,” said Tom Gieryn, vice provost for faculty and academic affairs. “The faculty review committee was challenged to select from so many superb nominees, all of whom have demonstrated solid accomplishments and exceptional promise.”

"Support for junior faculty as they progress toward tenure and support for promising areas of research and creative activity are both key objectives in the strategic plan for research on the IU Bloomington campus, " said Rick Van Kooten, interim vice provost for research at IU Bloomington. “I'm delighted that we are able to recognize the advancements these five faculty members are making early in their careers. It bodes well for future outstanding contributions in their fields.”

Recipients, all of them assistant professors, are: Matthew Baggetta in the School of Public and Environmental Affairs; Dominick DiOrio in the Jacobs School of Music; Mary Murphy in the Department of Psychological and Brain Sciences in the College of Arts and Sciences; Judy Qiu in the School of Informatics and Computing; and Babak Seradjeh in the Department of Physics in the College of Arts and Sciences.

The award provides a grant of $15,000, which faculty members may use to support their research, scholarship or creative activity.

Matthew Baggetta

Baggetta has been an IU SPEA faculty member since 2010. His research interests include civil society and civic engagement, membership-based organizations and social movements. He has a bachelor’s degree in sociology from the University of Notre Dame and master’s and Ph.D. degrees in sociology from Harvard University.

His work focuses on the impact of voluntary associations on their members and on society. He has conducted studies of Sierra Club chapters, local community choirs and campus-based student groups. His research has been published in the American Sociological Review, American Journal of Sociology, Social Forces, and Perspectives on Politics. He has won several teaching awards including an Indiana University Trustees Teaching Award in 2014.

Dominick DiOrio

DiOrio is an assistant professor of choral conducting at the Jacobs School, where he directs NOTUS: IU Contemporary Vocal Ensemble, an auditioned chorus specializing in music of living composers. An IU Bloomington faculty member since 2012, he previously was director of choral activities at Lone Star College-Montgomery in Texas. He earned a bachelor’s degree in conducting from Ithaca College and master’s and doctoral degrees in conducting from Yale University.

DiOrio mentors graduate choral conducting majors and teaches score reading, choral literature and conducting. Under his leadership, NOTUS has performed for both regional and national conferences of the American Choral Directors Association and on the Distinguished Concerts International New York Artist Series at Carnegie Hall. Also a noted composer, DiOrio has had original works published by G. Schirmer, Boosey & Hawkes, Edition Peters, and Oxford University Press, among others. In 2014, he was named the winner of The American Prize in Composition (professional choral division) out of a national pool of over 120 other composers, with the judges saying “his depth of vision, mastery of compositional technique, and unique style set him in a category by himself."

Mary Murphy

Murphy’s research examines how to make diversity work. She studies how intergroup contexts shape people’s sense of belonging, identity and behavior. She has been a faculty member at IU Bloomington since 2012 and was previously at the University of Illinois-Chicago. She has a bachelor’s degree from the University of Texas at Austin and an M.A. and a Ph.D. in social psychology from Stanford University.

Murphy put forward the “cues hypothesis” that posits that situational cues – ranging from the concrete and physical arrangements of a setting to implicit norms or philosophies of an organization – affect the meaning and value that people ascribe to their social identities. Her research also examines how organizational mindsets affect people’s values and behavior and how to promote productive intergroup interactions and friendship in a diverse world.

Judy Qiu

Qiu’s research focuses on data-intensive computing at the intersection of cloud and multicore technologies with an emphasis on life science, streaming and deep learning applications. She has an undergraduate degree from Beihang University and master’s and Ph.D. degrees in computer science from Syracuse University.

Qiu is co-principal investigator for a $5 million National Science Foundation research project to develop and implement building blocks that improve data-intensive analysis on a range of cyberinfrastructure. She leads the SALSA computing program in the IU Pervasive Technology Institute and is assistant director of Digital Science Center. She received a National Science Foundation CAREER Award in 2012 and an IU Trustees Award for Teaching Excellence in 2013-14.

Babak Seradjeh

Seradjeh conducts research in condensed matter theory, working on problems related to topological insulators and superconductors, Majorana fermions in condensed matter systems, and realization and manipulation of fractional particles. He uses a variety of techniques aiming to understand the fundamental principles governing these systems and the potential application of their properties.

An IU faculty member since 2011, he has bachelor’s and master’s degrees from Sharif University of Technology and a Ph.D. from Simon Fraser University in Canada. He received a National Science Foundation CAREER Award and IU’s Joseph and Sophia Konopinski Award for Outstanding Teaching in physics, both in 2014. Prior to joining IU, he was a postdoctoral research at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and the University of British Columbia.

The Outstanding Junior Faculty Awards were established in 1985 by the Dean of the Faculties Office (now the Office of the Vice Provost for Faculty and Academic Affairs) and the Office of Research and Graduate Development (now the Office of the Vice Provost for Research). For more information, email vpfaa@indiana.edu.